Ian Jack: Time for a Royal Wedding ... While England Is Royally Screwed
Jack is a British journalist and author of The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.
...The country is used to the idea of national decline: “declinism” became a feature of British historical study many years ago—the U.S. is just now catching up. Public fears over the nation’s capability date back to at least the Boer War. Today, however, the country is filled with a sense of foreboding that I can’t remember paralleled in my lifetime. Two decades, the 1970s and ’80s, are often invoked as specters. The political right, which includes the coalition government, invokes an era of labor strikes ending with an IMF bailout when it says “we mustn’t go back to the ’70s.” The left counters with a warning against the ’80s, when Margaret Thatcher remade Britain as a largely postindustrial society, privatizing swaths of the economy, abolishing union power, and wiping out manufacturing. But the events of neither decade threatened Britain’s idea of itself so completely as the debt exposed by the banking crash and the present government’s policy to restore economic confidence by slashing public programs.
Thirty years ago, when the couple who became Prince William’s parents got married, Britain was a country that hadn’t changed all that much since the queen’s coronation in 1953. I covered the wedding as a reporter. Crowds lined the royal route all the way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s—some families had been in place for days—and they were unironic in their patriotism (and, for a city with substantial ethnic minorities, remarkably white). Even at the time, I noted this as an anachronism—they were the kind of people celebrated in postwar Ealing comedies and films about the Blitz: cheerful, inclined to sing beery tunes and wear paper hats, they’d emerged from ordinary suburbs and towns to make this their big day out. Looking back, what’s more surprising is the many other things we mistook as -everyday and permanent. It didn’t seem at all odd, for example, that Charles and Diana should set off on their honeymoon in a royal train; or that they should continue their honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia, crewed by 220 seamen and 20 officers as it crisscrossed the Mediterranean with the couple as its only cargo....